This week was busy and exciting; I completed a lot of work and had my first presentation about my project, where I presented the PowerPoint that I was working on for the past few weeks! Dr. Bassett also invited me to present my project at the lab meeting on August 18, I am very excited and grateful for that opportunity.
Dr. Bassett was away on Monday and Tuesday. So, Monday I continued working on my paper; adding information and editing what I have so far. I also emailed Dr. Bassett a PowerPoint of what I completed the previous week when she was away.
On Tuesday, Dr. Bassett emailed me that she was intrigued by the community structure I got from the consensus partitions and suggested I look further into it. So, first, I completed community detection and consensus partitions on the brain coherence matrices (from the original fMRI adjacency (coherence) matrices in order to see if the community partitions were significantly different from the partitions from the networks where the edges of the correlation between interference and the scans (coherence matrices). I completed that and observed that the community partitions were significantly different than the consensus partitions indicating that interference plays a role in creating and changing the community structure. Dr. Bassett also wanted me to look at the edge strength of the networks. Since up until now I have been working with binary matrices, (containing only 0s and 1s) I went back and re-did everything using edge weights.
I continued working on re-doing everything with edge weights on Wednesday.
Thursday, Dr. Bassett and I met and decided that using binary matrices produced better results than using the matrices with edge weights, so we decided to stick to using binary matrices. Dr. Bassett and I also went over the PowerPoint that I would present to two other researchers on Friday. The rest of Thursday, I spent making changes to the PowerPoint.
Friday was a very exciting day. I prepared for the conference in the morning and at noon, I met with Dr. Bassett and we had a conference call with two researchers, Nicholas and Scott. I sent my PowerPoint to them and talked about each slide over the phone. Scott and Nicholas than gave us suggestions on what I could do with the results and data we have. It was really helpful to hear their thoughts and ideas! They suggested that I look at the distribution of the interference values for the different sessions in order to see if they follow a normal distribution, or if there are out-liars. I spent Friday completing the distributions for the sessions using interference values from the ANOVA and also using the difference between pre and post movement times for the sessions as interference values. After creating those plots, I went on to combining the interference values of the 20 subjects for both scanning sessions and splitting the now 40 subject group into 2 groups based on if the subject had interference or didn't have interference. I did that twice for the interference values from the ANOVA and the difference between pre and post movement times for the 2 sessions. For the ANOVA, if the p-value was significant, than the subject had interference. For the difference between pre and post movement times, if the difference was negative, than the subject had interference. I then completed a t-test between the two groups, for the two different ways I found the interference values.
I feel like I am learning so much at this lab, I am excited to see what else I learn and complete during my remaining 3 weeks at the lab!
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